Janet Echelman Lecture

JANET ECHELMAN LECTURE

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26 at 7:30 pm

at Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main Street, Wellfleet, MA

$25 / $20 for Members

This year's Woody English Distinguished Artists and Writers Chair is renowned artist Janet Echelman, she will give a lecture on her work on August 26th at Wellfleet Preservation Hall at 7:30 pm. Tickets are $25, or $20 for Castle Hill Members. Register for this event by clicking the button below or by calling 508-349-7511 for tickets.

Join us on August 26th as Janet Echelman discusses her work to create social spaces for people to gather, including her most recent work, which is suspended over Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway. The sculpture spans the void where an elevated highway once split downtown from its waterfront. Knitting together the urban fabric, “As If It Were Already Here” soars 600 feet through the air above street traffic and a pedestrian park.

How can we enhance public spaces in cities to make them engage individuals and community? What can entice us to slow down and take a moment of pause in our busy lives? Janet Echelman shares her journey exploring these questions in cities across the globe, from San Francisco to New York City, Amsterdam to Sydney.

Janet Echelman builds living, breathing sculpture environments that respond to the forces of nature — wind, water and light — and become inviting focal points for civic life. Exploring the potential of unlikely materials, from fishing net to atomized water particles, Echelman combines ancient craft with cutting-edge technology to create her permanent sculpture at the scale of buildings. Experiential in nature, the result is sculpture that shifts from being an object you look at, to something you can get lost in.

Recent prominent works include: “Her Secret is Patience” spanning two city blocks in downtown Phoenix, “Water Sky Garden” which premiered for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, “She Changes” on the waterfront in Porto, Portugal, and “Every Beating Second” in San Francisco Airport’s new Terminal Two.

Recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Echelman was named an Architectural Digest 2012 Innovator for “changing the very essence of urban spaces.” Her TED talk “Taking Imagination Seriously” has been translated into 34 languages and is estimated to have been viewed by more than a million people worldwide. She recently received the 2014 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts, honoring “the greatest innovators in America today.”